What's On My Face? A Wearable Teleprompter I Invented

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[Mechanical keyboard clacking] [SPROING!] [smash!] [Triumphant marching-band music] Ladies, gentlemen, and cyborgs... we did it!   Voidstar Lab has officially joined the four-digit  club! We beat the odds, we did the impossible,   we got to 1000 subscribers without a pillow shaped  like a subscribe button! As a tribute to YOU,   the handsomest and most intellectual audience on  YouTube, I'm going to acknowledge the elephant on   my face. This wearable computer has appeared in  all but one of my videos, and that video was bad.   That wasn't a coincidence, because the Optigon  isn't a prop. I'm wearing a fully-functional   heads-up display that I use as a teleprompter,  and if you don't believe me, get in my eyeball. Welcome to my left eyeball! As you can see,  this is a transparent display about the size   of an iPad held at arm's length. It's a lot like  a Google Glass except it's positioned in front of   my eye and the picture is about four times larger.  Unlike a Glass, the Optigon doesn't have a camera.   Also, the thing on my face is just  the display; the computer part of   the wearable computer is this belt pack.  It's basically a screenless Android tablet. So, how did I make this thing, and  how did it end up on my face? Why   does every episode of Voidstar  Lab feature a wearable computer?   Well, my story begins like all epics  of the modern era - as an intern. The year is 2007 and I still thought  I could pass engineering school.   I had a summer job working for an entrepreneur  named [in enthusiastic British accent] Simon   Buckingham. I'm not making fun of him -  that's actually how he introduced himself.   I was ghostwriting a blog post and I ended up  on Hackaday. This guy discovered that a $25   replacement headset from a Wild Planet spy car  was super-easy to turn into a wearable computer.   I thought this was the coolest thing ever, AND  the headset was in stock, AND it was on sale!   My finger circled the 'Buy' button  like a shark around a tender baby. You see, my previous hack, a Nerf ammo counter,  turned out to be a hot-sauce diarrhea dump,   and I wasn't exactly confident that I  COULD finish an electronics project.   I decided to take the responsible choice and think  about it til I got home. So as soon as I arrived,   I jumped on the Wild Planet website and discovered  that Hackaday readers had hoovered up every   single damn headset. I even called the Wild  Planet warehouse to beg for spares, but some   Fart-Suckerberg had beaten me to it and cleaned  them out. A normie would have stopped here, but   by Jove, I was a nerd, and I wanted to  stick a computer on my face. It was ON. I settled on the Vuzix iWear AV230 as the  display, an Arduino Uno as the brains,   and a coat hanger as the headset. Yeah, an  Arduino! The Vuzix had a 320x240 resolution, but   the Arduino couldn't buffer a single monochrome  frame. It was a terrible choice! But despite not   knowing anything about soldering, electronics,  or really anything of relevance to the project,   I did manage to finish a functional wearable  computer. Literally immediately, I wore it to   the New Jersey Tech Meetup. They were doing some  sort of best-pitch award that night, and my new   cybernetic augmentations gave me an insurmountable  edge. So this guy Bert sees my heads-up display,   asks me if I want to join a hackerspace. I don't  know what a hackerspace is, so I say hell yeah!   It turns out he was actually FOUNDING a  hackerspace, so yeah, we made a hackerspace. They somehow got Eben Upton, the guy who invented  the Raspberry Pi, to go to the hackerspace and do   a meet-and-greet. I wanted to show off, so I  bought a new video headset, the MyVu Crystal,   I unbent another coat hanger, and I  built another improved heads-up display   to connect to a Raspberry Pi. Eben loved  the project, he signed the Pi, and I have   cherished that ever since. [Sheepishly] It is my  personal favorite single board computer. [Cough] Then, a well-known tech company released a  wearable computer and I threw myself on that   bandwagon face-first. [Google Glass camera  shutter sound] Around that time, I started   building prototypes and I formed Voidstar  Lab. One client wanted an augmented-reality   bike helmet and we built it around an  off-the-shelf video headset made by Epson.   I liked the Moverio so much that it inspired  another wearable, the Optigon, which is what   you see here. Actually, all of my wearables are  called Optigon because I am profoundly uncreative.   If you have another name idea that doesn't  involve Dragonball, put it in a comment. The Moverio series are Android-based  video headsets. Epson's marketing   features first-person drone piloting, medical  visualizations, manufacturing... but this headset   is not powerful enough to do any of those.  It's clear that the #1 use case for things   like this is watching porno on an airplane.  [Trade-show ambiance in background] it's a   completely different experience from staring  at my monitor! I picked this headset not for   its good looks or for its powerful chipset,  but for its legitimately exceptional optics. What's going on here is that the backlight shines  through a teeny-tiny LCD panel and projects the   image onto the lens. The optics inside the  projector compress that picture down into a   thin bar of light, which reflects off this curved  mirror and gets opened back up by this prism.   The end product is a big, crisp see-through  picture in a crystal clear lens, which is a   little chunky but still comfortable enough to wear  all day. Less light leaving the lens means more   light hitting my eyeballs, and more likes on this  video means more... uh... I can't. I can't call to   action today. Like, you folks have already gone,  like, above and beyond to get us here. Thank you. I hacked this hardware so thoroughly that  I actually forgot nearly everything I did,   and writing this video was almost  like reverse engineering the project   as I rediscovered all the jank. In no  particular order, some of the mods include:  I stripped the display modules out of the  headset and I ground away the mounting tabs.  I pulled the driver module out of the right side  and hooked it up to the display module on the   left side. That's because the motion sensors are  on the right side, but I am left eye dominant.  I designed and printed a new monocular  enclosure, then mounted it to a pair of   cheapo glasses frames and cut off the excess. I pulled the camera out and I threw it in the   trash because the picture quality is so bad it  wasn't even worth building it into the model.  I rooted the Android, I sideloaded google services, and I   used Xposed to tune the UI for wearable use. I removed the onboard GPS chip antenna and   hacked in a powered U.FL port, then hooked it  up to a shoulder-mounted active GPS receiver. Those last two mods were important, because I  built this thing to play Ingress, the inscrutable   sci-fi predecessor to Pokemon Go. I even put the  Enlightened logo on this side. Death to Smurfs!   Ingress aggressively refused to run on  the Moverio - it took a lot of massaging,   but I was able to get Ingress running on  this thing, and I got photographic evidence!   Unfortunately, Ingress is unplayable these  days, even on devices that are more capable,   and as much as I'd love to pour some bursters  out for my homies, the Google gods' decree   is absolute. Side story: I continued to play  Ingress, and I met my wife through it. Hi, wife! The Optigon was kind of useless, but still  comfortable enough to wear all day, so it became,   like, a fashion accessory and a conversation piece  that I could wear to meetups and hacker cons. The   Optigon lay in its case, sad, lonely, and out  of battery. That was, until September 2020. I   was serious about the whole YouTube thing but I  could barely remember enough material to record   a single scene. If I wanted any chance to hit a  weekly schedule, I needed a teleprompter. What's   funny is that my first thought was to 3D-print  a tablet mount that attached to the camera,   but I didn't have a compatible tablet,  and I was kind of stumped. I was taking   a shower when I realized that I was literally  already wearing a display in, like, every shot. [Sobbing in the shower] I'm a worm! A cybernetic worm!! So, before we filmed the "Why  are Circuits on Boards" video,   I took my script and I loaded it into the Elegant  Teleprompter app. We filmed that episode twice   as fast as the previous two, and the Optigon  has been a crucial part of my gear ever since.   I will always have a special place in  my heart for head-mounted displays,   and now that I need teleprompting, a display will  always have a special place mounted to my head. But this ain't over. The Optigon looks  like it was half-assedly designed in a   drunken weekend on SketchUp by an idiot  and made on a 10 year old printer,   because that's exactly how it went  down. My viewers deserve better than   this blocky geometry and tacky tribal  team tattoos. Oooh, ho, ho, it's project time! First step was to hunt down the design files  on my computer and get them out of that cursed   Sketchup format and into Fusion 360. I just  took the dimensions and started from scratch,   and since I was starting from scratch, y'know,  might as well redesign the whole thing! Might as   well at this point, right? This original design is compact, but it concentrates all that mass on the hinge of the glasses. [SMACK!] That's the furthest  point from my face, and the moment of inertia   is significant. I moved the driver board  onto the arm of my glasses to shift mass away   from the hinge and closer to my ear. All of the  electronics and optics mount to the inner shell,   and the outer shell just slides over it and screws  in place. I put this interlocking sawtooth pattern   on the seam to conceal any mess and just make the  thing look cooler. The backlight should shine   directly on the driver board, so I added a little  window, gaming-PC style, to show off the innards.   Now, to replace that Ingress icon with  something more timeless, and nothing   says Optigon like... hexagons. In the  future, everything is made of hexagons. Printing prototypes and refining the design were  the easy parts - the hard part was picking a color   scheme. I originally wanted a glow-in-the-dark  inner piece and a shiny silk black outer, but that   shiny silk filament was just way too brittle for this  design. I switched to PETG, which is tougher than   PLA and also has this gorgeous glossy finish. My  90s instincts roared to life and reminded me that   the color of the future, like the color of my  Tamagotchi, is clear. Clear PETG transmits more   light than clear PLA, so once that backlight  turns on, things are going to get classy. [Funky future bass track] [Wub wub wub wub wub wub] Wearable computers got me into hacking,  and they brought me where I am today.   This project, Optigon, is my way of saying  that this story is going to continue   deep into the future. Thanks so much for  being part of it, and I will see you there.
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Channel: Zack Freedman
Views: 879,527
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: wearable technology, google glass, wearable tech, heads-up display, augmented reality, wearables, head-mount display, head-mounted display, cyborg, cybernetics, augmented, transhumanism, singularity, hardware hacking, hardware hack, hacking, diy electronics, electronics projects, diy projects, tech projects, 3d printing, soldering, project, 3d printed, 3d printing project, functional print, photography gear, videography gear, teleprompter
Id: 50614QMNQPo
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)
Published: Mon Oct 26 2020
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